Teaching investing lessons to high school students who barely have any experience earning a paycheck can be challenging! Investing is an especially tough topic to make meaningful for students who (most likely) have no experience in this area and may not have the opportunity to even start investing for years.
As with most lessons, allowing students an opportunity to get some hands-on learning experience is a great way to make things more meaningful.
Here’s an easy idea you can implement as part of your investing lessons: have students take an online risk tolerance quiz! This will help them learn a little more about their own risk tolerance and how that might inform their investing decisions in the future. I recommend having students take the quiz before discussing different types of investments so that students can connect each type of investment and their risk tolerance to help form an opinion on which investments might be right for them in the future.
What is a risk tolerance quiz?
A risk tolerance quiz is a tool that helps identify the financial risk you’re comfortable with when it comes to investing. A person’s risk tolerance can help identify which investments might be right for them. For example, someone with a high-risk tolerance might be comfortable with the ups and downs of stocks, while someone with a lower risk tolerance may prefer more stable, conservative investments like bonds or savings accounts.
Where can you find a risk tolerance quiz to use in the classroom?
I’ve found a few websites with risk tolerance quizzes that students can use to understand their risk tolerance. It can be a challenge to find online quizzes that ask questions that high school students can answer. (Many of them ask about past investment experience, household income, etc.)
Be sure to test out these websites before using them in your classroom – some may contain ads for financial products, which might cause them to be blocked by your school’s internet filter. They may also ask students for basic demographic information before displaying results. However, at the time of writing this, none of these websites require students to create an account or give their name or email address.
Here are a few that work well for high school students:
- Investment Risk Tolerance Assessment for the University of Missouri
- ‘Check Your Risk Tolerance’ Quiz from the Alberta Securities Commission
- Risk Tolerance Quiz from SoFi
The first two links contain similar quizzes, but I thought I’d provide both, just in case. The quiz in the third link contains a variety of different questions and is a bit shorter than the other two. You could choose to have students take both and compare the results. (If you find any of these links are no longer working, don’t hesitate to contact me here.)
Need more resources for teaching about investing?
Looking for more ideas to teach your students about investing? Click here to learn more about the Intro to Investing lesson!
Note: The companies/universities listed in this post do not endorse CKMath or CKMath resources, and CKMath does not endorse or is not sponsored by any companies/universities mentioned above. The links are provided for informational purposes only. CKMath does not provide financial advice.
